West Leeds: How people power can provide new homes

People power can provide affordable community housing right here in west Leeds, writes Rob Greenland and Paul Chatterton.

The pioneering low impact, affordable, co-operative co-housing Lilac project was set up right here in west Leeds three years ago.

Lilac has acted as a great example for one way that we can tackle the housing crisis, and residents of Lilac, which is a development made up of straw bale homes in Bramley, wanted to show how this model could be spread to other parts of Leeds. From these desires, Leeds Community Homes was created.

Rob Greenland

Leeds Community Homes was set up a year ago with the explicit aim of creating more affordable housing in our city.

We’re a community benefit society – which means we can raise money through community shares. We’re also able to act as a Community Land Trust for Leeds – meaning we can hold on to land and buildings for affordable use in perpetuity.

Last week we launched our first community share offer – which aims to raise £360,000 to invest in our first project – the purchase of 16 affordable homes on a development in the new Climate Innovation District in the centre of Leeds.

We’ll keep nine of the flats for social rental – and sell seven on at around two thirds of market value. There will be restrictions on future re-sales that will ensure that the homes continue to be available at below market price.

‘Back our approach’

Our target of £360,000 is ambitious, but we’re confident that we can encourage people to back our approach to creating more affordable homes.

We’re hopeful that people will be excited by our immediate plans to create affordable housing in the city centre – but also by our longer-term ambitions. Our long-term goal is to be involved in creating 1,000 affordable homes over 10 years – a contribution to the 66,000 target that has been identified for the city.

We anticipate that we’ll achieve that in a range of ways. We expect to build homes ourselves – most likely focusing on small, inner-city brownfield sites that bigger developers aren’t so interested in.

We’re also likely to build on the expertise that already exists amongst social enterprises in Leeds in renovating empty homes, by buying and renovating long-term empty properties that we can then rent out.

But we imagine that the main way we’ll work towards our target is by working with local people to support them to create housing in our city.

‘Inspired by Lilac’

We’re already in contact with three groups who’d like to create co-housing communities in our city – inspired by the example of Leeds co-housing pioneers LILAC.

And we’ve had all sorts of conversations with people who want to take control of meeting their housing needs – from student co-ops through to partnerships with local developers.

What people often need is access to expertise that helps them take their early-stage idea and turn it into something that has a good chance of working – and we think that’s where we could make a difference.

The scale of the problem that we face is clear to us – and we know it won’t be easy to try to make real progress on the three key issues Paul identified at our launch – affordability, sustainability and community.

But we are confident that if we can begin to build a movement in Leeds – focused around creating affordable housing – we could really make a difference in our city.

You can find out more about Leeds Community Homes at our website, and all the information about investing in the community share offer is here.